Dys4ia: A Game Analysis

(This piece was originally written in January 2017)

INTRODUCTION

Released in 2012, Dys4ia (Anthropy, 2012a) is an autobiographical videogame that chronicles its author’s experience while undergoing hormone replacement treatment. This essay will try to dissect and analyse the ways in which the game uses the videogame language to represent and express the experiences of a marginalized group to a relatively wide audience.

METHODOLOGY

This essay will look at Dys4ia on two levels: Mechanics and assets.

The way in which the mechanics try to emotionally affect the player will be analysed through the aesthetic framework that Järvinen developed in Understanding videogames as emotional experiences (Järvinen, 2008). His paper describes how the emotions players experience through playing are fundamentally tied to their position towards achieving the game’s goal, therefore the design of those goals and of the tools they are afforded to pursue them.

While a method like MDA (Hunicke et al., 2004) could be a more structured approach to look at aesthetics of play, the relatively simple nature of Dys4ia’s mechanics and its aforementioned requirement for the player to quickly discern each mini-game’s objective, make it a great fit for Järvinen’s goal-oriented approach.

In the specific, when talking about aesthetic, this essay refers to Niendenthal definition of the term:

“aesthetics […] is something that is performed in the course of play, a particular kind of pulling out of aesthetic pleasure from the game mechanics through the experience of our bodies.” (Niendenthal, 2009. p. 5)

meaning the emotional experience derived from, and intrinsic to, the player’s performing of the game’s dynamics.

The assets side (graphics and sound) will be instead looked at using two different methods. Firstly, to have a clear idea of how the player is pulled into action, and how the goals of the mini-games are communicated to them, we will look at the game assets and their placement through a semiotic approach.

Semiotics is the field of study that looks at how meaning is generated (Chandler, 2007, p. 2), and it will allow us to look at how the game assets are used to symbolise meaning and how they could be interpreted in a game-related context.

In parallel with that, the static nature of Dys4ia’s point of view will allow for a straightforward analysis of the mise-en-scene, meaning the audio-visual arrangement of the game’s assets to create environments (King and Krzywinska, 2006, p. 115). Aside from giving us a fuller picture of how the visuals and sounds of the game are used to set the mood, looking at the mise-en-scene will also give a wider context in which to frame the semiotic elements of the analysis.

The analysis itself will be carried through according to the fifteen elements delineated in Understanding Movies (Giannetti and Leach, 1999, p. 89). Specifically, the four elements that are more relevant in Dys4ia’s case, given its limited graphical fidelity, are:

“Dominant. Where is our eye attracted first? […] Color values. What is the dominant color? […] Composition. How is the two-dimensional space segmented and organized? […] Character placement. What part of the framed space do the characters occupy?” (Giannetti and Leach, 1999, p. 89)

THE GAME

Developed as a personal project by American game designer Anna Anthropy, Dys4ia is a collection of mini-games presented as part of a written framing narration that describes the author’s experience with gender dysphoria and hormone replacement treatment. The official website of the game describe the game in the following way:

“A journal game about the six months of my life when I made the decision to begin hormone replacement therapy.” (Anthropy, 2016)

The game is controlled entirely through the four directional keys, with almost all of the minigames being based in a way or another around navigating two-dimensional environments. To give some examples, some mini-games involve moving from point A to point B, others involve having to avoid harmful objects, while some others involve moving on a set pathway. Just like in WarioWare (Nintendo R&D1, 2003) the quick pace of these mini-games makes so that one of the core mechanics of the game becomes recognizing visuals and kinaesthetic patterns to quickly understand what each mini-game wants the player to do (Fishburn, 2014, p. 23). Differently to WarioWare though, Dys4ia doesn’t present ‘hard’ fail condition for its mini-games, as when the player fails to achieve the presented goals the game usually just shows a ‘lose’ animation and then moves on to the successive mini-game.

The narrative arc the game present is easily summed up by the four levels that make the game:

• “Level 1 — Gender Bullshit” about the author’s frustration with gender dysphoria
• “Level 2 — Hormonal Bullshit” about the author’s frustration with the red tape involved in undergoing hormone replacement therapy
• “Level 3 — Hormonal Bullshit” about the author’s frustration with the side effects of the therapy
• “Level 4 — It gets Better?” about how in the end things started being relatively better for her

The visuals with which the game represents its real-life situations are colourful and minimalistic, almost to an extreme. The backgrounds are monochromatic and the human figures are extremely stylized. Similarly, the soundtrack is minimalistic and atmospheric, never really taking ‘centre stage’ of the experience.

INTERFACE

After the initial title sequence, showing the logo of the game and crediting Liz Ryerson for the soundtrack, Dis4ia presents the player with one of the most familiar sights to be had in videogames. Just as if it was Mega Man (Capcom, 1987) or Super Mario World (Nintendo EAD, 1990), or any of many console action games, the first thing the player sees is a level selection menu. This is a type of iconography that immediately puts the player in the mindset of those arcade-oriented games, mentally preparing them for an experience characterized by the simple goal-oriented gameplay that characterizes those games. The connection that the player can make between this setup and a specific style of game could be seen as a ludic equivalent of cinematic “film grammar”, a set of structural and aesthetic paradigms that have come to assume a shared meaning for most audiences (Fortuna, 2010, p. 12). Although this setup will be later subverted and used to an effect, when the game will present the player with unsolvable mini-games in an attempt to represent frustration (Anthropy, 2012b).

The second thing that jumps to the eye is the stylized visual style, which makes no effort to hide the fact that the game assets have not been drawn by a professional artist. This, together with an opening text scroll shown before starting the game:

“This is an autobiographical game about my experiences with hormone replacement therapy, my experience isn’t anyone’s else’s and is not meant to be representative of every trans person” (Anthropy, 2012a)

Clearly frames the game as a deeply personal work. While the text scroll rationally clarifies it as a recounting of personal experiences, it is the sketched visual style that symbolically communicates to the player that this is not a carefully crafted analysis of those experiences, but an emotional and ‘immediate’ recounting of them. The point of it is, in short, not to look pretty, but to express and provide catharsis, just like, as Anthropy herself puts it, a journal or a diary (Anthropy, 2016).

REPETITION

Dys4ia is structured as a diverse series of mini-games that involve that player having to first figure out the goal of each mini-game, and then use the arrow keys to achieve that goal.

These games act in a very similar way to the abstract games described by Jason Bergy in his 2013 paper Experiential metaphors in abstract games (Bergy, 2013), by creating systems that require the player to engage in actions that are closely correlated to familiar situations, in order to affect them emotionally purely through the interaction. The difference with games like The Marriage (Humble, 2006) is that Dys4ia is not technically an “abstract game” despite using the same techniques of interactions that those game use. All the game pieces in Dys4ia are clear fiction-signs both on a visual and on an interactive level and there is minimalist yet constant narration that gives context to the experience, yet the interactive systems are not used merely to frame those visual and narrative themes, but actively contribute to them by evoking gestalts that are emotionally relevant to the situation.

An important structural element of how Dys4ia tells its story is how certain mini-games recur through the game, with part of their systems tweaked to reflect the narrative arc.

For example, after the author starts hormone replacement therapy, the player engages with a mini-game about how sensitive her nipples had become. In this section, the player moves a set of breasts around a 2D environment, and has to carefully navigate them through a tight field of harmful objects. We can easily see this interaction invoking uncomfortableness, as it engages the player in positioning an object that requires constant small movements, recalling things like fidgeting when in an uncomfortable position.

Later, the same visual setup comes back, with the player navigating that same set of breasts through an extremely similar field of harmful objects. The systems this time change though: as the player starts navigating around the harmful objects, the breast enlarges, showing how now they are able to freely knock them off on contact. Reading this through the lens developed by Järvinen, for which the emotions of a player engaging in a game experience depend on their situation in regards to the game’s goal (Järvinen, 2009, pp. 86–87), we can easily see this repetition and subversion as a clear narrative arc. The first mini-game shows Anthropy’s initial uncomfortableness with her body as the therapy started, as the player is faced with a hard objective that requires careful use of imprecise controls, while the second mini-game offers empowerment, transforming a hard objective into an easy one, which is now achievable with freeform movement.

This technique of repetition and subversion is used multiple times during the game, achieving clear and engaging narrative arcs defined not only by text or visuals, but mainly by interactive systems.

FRUSTRATION

Another technique that Dys4ia uses often is to subvert the initial expectation of the player that to play the game ‘correctly’ they need to fulfil the goals that the mini-game present them (expectation reinforced by the iconography in the first game screen mentioned before). Especially in the first section of the game, where the author is dealing with gender dysphoria, the player is faced with mini-games that present an initially clear goal that is actually impossible to reach within the game’s systems.

One of the first mini-games to do this happens when the author is describing how she was verbally assaulted by trans-exclusionary feminists that did not consider her a woman. As this mini-game starts, the player is presented with three game-objects: A shield, on the left, which they can move up and down, and two mouths on the right, which move around randomly and shoot speech bubbles toward the shield. The player looking at this will immediately assume that their task is to parry the speech bubbles with the shield, given that a shield is a generally known symbol of protection against harm and the narration makes it clear that the speech bubbles are harmful to the author. Once the first speech bubble collides with the shield, the reaction of that game object subvert the expectations that the player had, as a low descending sound plays and the object flashes in a manner resembling the ‘invincibility frames’ animations that often denote being hit in 2D games (Megaman (Capcom, 1987) is one of many possible examples). After that, the player will try to avoid the speech bubbles, in their attempt to unfurl the mechanics of the game, but even then, the result will be a descending sound and an indicator of failure coming from the right side of the screen.

The mini-game ultimately ends after a set amount of time, without any clear symbol of victory presented to the player. Looking at this whole again through Järvinen’s lens, we can place the player as chasing a goal that’s both unclear and unreachable, as every suggestion the game makes toward the resolution of said goal is constantly subverted. This, as also pointed by the author in an interview with Ben Kuchera, is an attempt at invoking frustration in the player to match the situations described in the game’s narration (Anthropy, 2012b). As per the technique mentioned before, this will also be developed further, as the frustration will be increased in the second reiteration of this mini-game, and then subverted in the third, where finally the shield is able to reflect the speech bubbles back at the ‘enemies’, empowering the player to finally achieve the apparent goal of not being hit.

WALL

Another arc of mini-games that is worth analysing is the one involving the player trying to ‘fit in’ into a hole in a wall. This mini-game marks the beginning, the middle and end of the game, being the first thing the player engages with after selecting the first level, and the last thing they play before completing the game.

After selecting the level, the game opens with said mini-game in which the player controls a polygonal block and is tasked to move it through a hole in a wall (as shown by an arrow that points them to the other side of the wall), accompanied by the narration “I feel weird about my body” (Anthropy, 2012a). The prominent colour in this scene is overwhelmingly pink, which contrasts with the blue tone of the player-controlled block, immediately exemplifying on a visual level the conflict inherent to the gender dysphoria felt by the author. Despite this, the object to which the player’s eye is immediately drawn to is the wall, as its yellow colour and detailing make it stand up the most, and its placement slightly above the centre of the screen positions it right in front of the player’s eye line.

As the player tries to execute the ascending motion requested by the game, moving their block from the bottom of the screen to the top, they will find that there is no actual way to execute the task. The hole in the wall, despite offering room to fiddle within it, is ultimately unpassable by the shape the player is given. This plays again on the elements of frustration noted above, while also introducing this ascending motion that will recur through the game, as an ‘uplifting’ movement that the player is rarely able to complete.

The first time this motion is encountered again is in the moment in which she decides to start hormone replacement therapy. This is one of the few moments in the game entirely charged with positive emotion. Unlike in other sections the colour palette is less contrasting, as the colours are all coordinated shades of blue that go together with the bright cyan sky of the background. Again, the attention of the player is brought to the upper part of the screen, as there is writing, which reads “Maybe I should finally go on” (Anthropy, 2012a), and a dark cloud hanging underneath it. The player moves the object they are in control of (a sun) toward their point of focus (the cloud), doing that they finally complete the rising upward motion, this time with no interruption. This creates the visual image of a sunrise (the sun rising from the bottom of the screen to the top), also dispelling the aforementioned cloud as it comes in contact with the sun, which reveals the word “hormones”, completing the sentence.

This initial positivity is brought down again at the half-point of the game, as the author is dealing with the initial side effects of hormone replacement theory. The player encounters again the ‘wall’ mini-game. This time the background is a much gloomier shade of dark blue while the wall is still the centre of attention in its new pink colouration. More importantly, the player now controls an even more misshapen and unwieldy block, which causes them to have to stop their ascending movement even before, with this new shape not allowing them even fully to enter the hole.

After this, the player encounters this setup once more at the end of the game. First, there is another section with the blue sky and an uplifting motion, this time revealing a narration about how uplifting it is for the author to have finally undertaken these steps toward gender reassignment. After this newly positive setup, the game ends once again with the ‘wall’ minigame.

Unlike in the second instance of the mini-game, this time the colours are again vivid and contrasting. The most notable object this time is the block the player controls, as it is not a static image anymore but an ever-changing series of shapes flashing of multiple colours.

This last segment subverts the arc structure developed through the whole of the game. While most repeated mini-games present a frustrating situation and then ‘solve it’, in this case, the game ends with a hard cut just as the player is about to finally go through the hole. This, together with the “The end. Just the beginning” text scroll shown after and this last level’s name being a question (“Level 4 — It gets Better?”), undermines the uplifting nature that the developed structure implies. The lack of this final closure leaves the player with an ending that reminds them that despite all the improvement the author achieved with the therapy, the road is still long ahead, something that could even be considered somewhat relevant to the wider subject of transgender rights as a whole.

SMALL ACTS

One last thing to consider when looking at Dys4ia is that in between these ‘arcs’ the game also has the player interact with even smaller mini-games, that unlike the others do not frame themselves as semi-abstract goal-oriented games, but instead as diegetic events in which the player has minimal interactions.

These may vary from repeatedly having to press right to fill a form to having to wait for a bit in a waiting room, and could be compared to the kind of micro-interactions of games like Dinner Date (Stout Games, 2010). Rather than trying to present her experience as a universal whole, following conventional game design that generally tries to represent broad and game-changing actions (Atkins, 2003, p.41), Dys4ia focuses on the day to day, on the smaller actions, in order to create a connection on a human level between the player and the author, rather than on a conceptual level.

CONCLUSION

Years after making Dys4ia Anna Anthropy went on to criticize the concept of empathy games:

“the installation is a reaction to the conversation around “empathy games” […] using a game like dys4ia as a substitute for truly educating themselves on issues surrounding trans women’s lives and how to support them. you can walk literal miles in my shoes and still not have learned anything about my experience” (Anthropy, 2015) but when dissecting Dys4ia it can be seen that even before this critique the game was accomplishing something slightly different than most empathy or educational games.

Rather than trying to present us with a system that rhetorically represents all the aspects of an issue, it creates human contact between the player and the game by metaphorically representing her emotional journey through a carefully crafted series of variances on similar mechanics. It does not attempt to make us ‘walk in her shoes’ but instead makes us relate to her small daily actions and insecurities as they changed through her journey.

While a game like Dys4ia will surely never replace proper instruction on transgender issues, it can be a powerful tool to communicate the frustrations and general gamma of emotions behind that experience in a direct and tacit way that would not be possible in any other medium.

REFERENCES

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